MPlayer as a music player

The oddest thing in my transition from an Openbox setup to an Awesome desktop on my Thinkpad has been the music player.

I tried installing cplay from a contrib port, but ran into a little difficulty. cplay would run but couldn’t find the client players — things like sox, or mpg123 or whatever — that otherwise do the dirty work. cplay doesn’t really play the songs, it just stands as an organizer and control mechanism.

And I knew the players were working because I could cue music from the command line with them. I even tried the cplayrc file which is included with the source package, but that proved fruitless too, and nothing was coming out of the speakers.

I considered just keeping the command-line players and running things that way, but I remembered that I already had one installed — mplayer. And since it seems to be able to handle any file format I throw at it (ogg and mp3 being the most frequent), I decided to stick with that alone.

It makes sense in one way — so long as I’m going to cue music from the command line, I might as well use one that has volume control, seeking ability, a playback counter and the ability to cue files from a directory.

The other command-line players — things like mpg321, ogg321 et al. — seemed to all fall down on one of those categories.

In the mean time I’ll search for another command-line music player that suits me. For what it’s worth I did take an obligatory look at mpd and ncmpc, but the two wouldn’t communicate with each other, and I didn’t care to serve as marriage counselor to a pair that should otherwise play together nicely. 😉